


Sixth Sense

by nirejseki



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Fix-It, Gen, M/M, Multi, Telepathic Bond, mostly coldwave, only implications of rogue canary
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-15
Updated: 2016-08-15
Packaged: 2018-08-08 20:14:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7771606
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nirejseki/pseuds/nirejseki
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I didn’t even know about any telepathic bond before you came up with the idea,” Snart says stubbornly. “Much less how to use it.  You sure you’re not just mistaking thirty years’ acquaintance for something you wanna see?”</p><p>(Mick Rory and Leonard Snart have a telepathic bond. Sara's the only one who notices.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sixth Sense

You get used to weird stuff when you’re with the League of Assassins. Things you would previously discard as ridiculous suddenly become possible, usually with horrifying results in the near future. Magic, superstition…Sara was _dead_ for a while. Not much you doubt after that.

She figures that’s why she’s the only one who notices.

In fairness, they’re pretty subtle about it, and no one is going to look at two guys with super-powered cold and heat guns in a city full of metahumans and go: these guys, these guys are something out of the ordinary.

Beyond the clinical insanity of going up against a super-speedster with no powers and a gun, anyway. 

No one questions it when Mick and Len work together, perfectly in sync; they’ve been friends and partners for god knows how long, and working together with someone for a long time will get you to that point naturally.

It’s the music that first tips her off that’s it's something more.

It’s early days on the Waverider and she’s not comfortable yet, so she’s taken to wandering around. She’s doing a circuit around the ship: bridge, bedrooms, infirmary, kitchen, bridge, repeat. 

Snart’s on the bridge, perched in a chair (for once), reading what appears to be one of those instruction manuals that Jax dug up. His leg keeps twitching along to the beat of some invisible music; she thinks he’s wearing headphones at first, but no, she doesn’t see any. Just bobbing along to his own little tune. She amuses herself for a few minutes trying to figure out the beat – bom, bom, bom BOM bom, bom-bom, bom-bom…

She wanders out and around to the living quarters. Ray is fixing his ATOM suit. Kendra’s door is shut, but she’s probably still moping. Or napping. Sara’s hoping for napping, but she doesn’t have much faith.

Rory’s in his room, door open, working on some mechanical thing, rocking some obscure vaguely metal, vaguely techno song on his headphones turned up way too loud, the baseline so deep it sounds like it’s shaking the corridor in time – bom, bom, bom BOM bom, bom-bom, bom-bom…

Sara’s feet slow down a little. 

Huh.

Coincidence?

She pokes her head in. “Hey, Rory – _hey, Rory_!” she howls, trying to beat the music. He starts a little, yanks off his headphones and turns to her, arching his eyebrows. 

“You have any Judas Priest on there?” she asked. “Manowar?” 

He shrugs. “Sure.”

She requests a song that she knows has a very atypical beat pattern. Amused, Rory complies, switching his music and then settling back to what he was doing before. It looks like he’s take a part of the ship out and is taking it apart to see how it works.

Sara quickly retraces her steps back to the bridge.

Sure enough, Snart’s still there, past the sound-proofed doors, his leg beating in time, still reading that instruction manual. She counts the beats to the new song that she knows Rory’s playing, and, sure enough, Snart’s beating along to the song she’d asked Rory to put on. Plus, now that she looks closer, she can identify the section of the instruction manual he’s reading as relating to the part that Rory’s working on. 

Sara smirks. _Gotcha._

After a few moments, Snart notices her staring and raises an eyebrow at her. She winks at him and walks off, leaving him looking after her with a slightly bemused expression. 

\----------

It’s not until later that she figures out they might not even _realize_ what’s going on.

She’s been collecting anecdotes from the others – Ray’s description of the two of them finishing each other’s sentences before turning in perfect unison to punch the guards behind had been hilarious, with Ray earnestly wondering how many times they’ve done it before to get the timing so perfect (like synchronized swimming, he had marveled), while Jax’s rendition of their trip to get the emerald, when they spoke in half-finished sentences that nevertheless conveyed everything they needed to know, was both heart-rending and adorable – but it’s not until they agree to split up, Snart to help Palmer with the scientist and Rory with Hunter to track down the temporal anomaly, that she gets a bit concerned.

That Snart’s the decision maker of the two of them is clear – she doesn’t like that Hunter waits until Snart is occupied to ask Rory to play bodyguard. 

Sara might not know much about telepathic bonds, having only encountered a handful, but judging by the way the two of them lived in each other’s pockets the majority of the time they’ve been on board, she figures that Snart wouldn’t approve of Hunter’s play, either. She’s just not sure why Rory’s going along with it.

She leaves off her training with Kendra to speak to Rory as he gets his gear on before heading out. 

“You sure you wanna head out without checking in with Snart?” she asks, gesturing at her head. 

Rory looks at her incredulously. “Snart’s at the ballet with the commie scientist chick,” he points out. “I’m not going to raise him on the comms to ask permission for some playtime.”

He leaves her behind, gaping a little and wondering.

Maybe the bond is one-sided on Snart’s side? But that doesn’t seem to jibe; she’s met mystics and psychics and mediums, the real thing rather than the charlatans that line Starling City’s streets, and independent psychic power like that carries a terrible burden that leaves an almost visible mark. If Snart could read minds, she likes to think she’d have noticed already. 

Besides, someone with his personality wouldn’t be able to hide that sort of advantage.

Maybe Snart managed to keep the truth from Rory somehow? But _why?_

Sara’s unsurprised to hear that when Snart was pinned down by Russians, Rory rushed in to save his partner and got caught. Snart’s Rory-esque rage when told to abandon his partner is equally unsurprising. 

She’s pissed off that she and Kendra were left behind; she feels certain that this entire thing could have been avoided if they hadn’t been left entirely out of the loop. Hunter’s positioning of his resources is legitimately terrible. Something will have to be done about that, though she doesn’t know what. 

Sara goes to talk to Snart while the others are debating whether their captured teammates are still alive, figuring that she may as well check in with the smarter half. “How’s Rory doing?” she asks.

He glares at her. “I don’t know,” he drawls, still managing to sound deeply aggravated. “He’s in a Soviet gulag, so I’m going to guess he ain’t feeling all too great, but I’m not sure, what do you think?”

She hesitates. _Both_ of them unaware? Surely not.

“You can’t tell how he’s doing?”

His glare changes to a look of incredulity. “I’m here and he’s there. How would I know? It’s not like we’re the Professor and Jax or whatever.”

Snart pauses, his eyes lighting up with realization of what he just said, and he smirks at her before bowing out and heading to where Jax is moping.

Sara’s left wondering how the hell Snart and Rory got into each other’s heads without noticing.

She keeps an eye on them, winces a little when Snart becomes unusually irritable at unpredictable points. She watches and frowns when he unconsciously rubs his side, as if instinctively seeking to check the damage of a bruise made on flesh that isn’t his. 

She starts worrying.

\-----------------

Watching them fight after 2046 is painful – they’re disjointed, clumsy where they once were graceful, a perfect pair falling out of each other’s orbit. Rory avoids speaking with Snart; Snart avoids interacting with Rory. They’re out of sync. It’s in all the little things: Snart returning an extra bottle of water to the kitchen after he’d instinctively grabbed two; Rory walking all the way to Snart’s door before remembering and turning away. 

It’s more than just an argument between friends, though. 

Sara can see the way it wears on both of them in deeper ways, even if she’s the only one who notices.

She sees Rory pacing frantically, manically, unable to sit still for a moment even as Snart’s movements get slower and slower, languid and apathetic to the point of sloth. Snart stops eating; Rory starts eating too much. Snart’s hands shaking after Rory drinks four cups of coffee. Rory developing circles under his eyes despite sleeping for hours and hours extra; Snart always lurking around the ship no matter what time it was.

Neither seems to know how to solve the issue. 

Sara’s heart may not have come back with her from the dead, but it hurts her to watch. She tries talking to one, tries talking to the other, but they shut her out. 

She wishes that it would end, one way or the other.

It takes less than a week for her to regret thinking that.

Rip orders Snart to “take care of” Rory. Sara can’t believe he even asked, much less that Snart would ever go through with it. _She_ notices when Snart uses vague terms to describe what he did with Rory – for someone as precise as Snart, that’s practically a gimme. She figures he ditched Rory somewhere isolated, with plans to pick him up later. It’s what she would do.

Still, Snart doesn’t come back quite right. If before he was disjointed, now he is hollow. She’d heard that his nickname was Cold; it only rings more and more true as the days without Mick go by. He’s crueler, more vicious, less patient, less willing to consider other options. He shoots to kill as his first choice, not his last. 

He’s taken to sitting alone, still as a corpse, staring blankly into nothingness. He’ll react when you talk to him, his drawl slow, his reaction time slower, but there’s something vital missing there. Some spark of life, some internal fire, that Rory took with him when he left.

Sara starts worrying that maybe she was wrong. Maybe the goddamn idiot _did_ kill half of his mind out there in some isolated moment instead of just leaving him behind. 

Oddly enough, contrary to the last few weeks, the one thing Snart does do is eat. And eat and eat and eat and eat, as if he’s trying to make up for the over-long period in which he seemed to draw calories from the empty air. He’s still losing weight, annoyingly enough; Kendra had commented jealously that _she’d_ like to eat four cinnamon buns in a row and still look like she’d lost three pounds the next morning. 

One day he doesn’t get up. No one else notices, as it’s a transit day, stuck in the Temporal Zone with nothing to do, but Sara’s been watching. She knows Snart has a routine he follows in the mornings, and he’s not up today.

She goes to his room without knocking. He’s lying in bed. For a heart-rending second, she can’t tell if he’s breathing; his face is so pale it seems almost blue, like he froze to death inside Gideon’s perfect temperature control.

“Snart?” Sara asks, moving closer. His skin is icy to the touch, but he has a pulse. He doesn’t react to the uninvited touch, though, and that’s concerning. “Snart!”

She slaps him. When that doesn’t work, she clambers onto his belly, uses her knees to anchor herself, and slaps him even harder.

He blinks at her, long and slow. “Sara?” he asks groggily, as if waking up from a year’s worth of sleep instead of a day.

“Where did you leave him?” she snaps. 

“What?”

“Rory! Where’d you leave him? We need to go back and get him, or you’re going to die.”

“He’s not there anymore,” Snart says dreamily. “He’s gone. To the end.”

“The end?” Sara asks, sheer shock creeping into her tone. Everything she’s ever learned with the league said that the mere idea that one member of a telepathic bond could kill the other is unthinkable, and yet…“You didn’t kill him,” she insists. “He’s not dead.”

“No,” Snart agrees. “Oh, look at that.”

He falls silent again.

She pulls her hand back again and slaps him – or she tries. His hand moved faster than he’s been able to move in over a week, caught it right before it hit.

“Shh, Blondie,” he said, eyes still blank. “Don’t bother me. There’s so much to see.”

“What the hell are you even seeing?” she asked before the full import of his comment sunk in.

Snart wasn’t the type to call people nicknames; that was Rory’s game. 

She hesitates. “Rory?” she asks quietly. “Hey, Rory. Where are you?”

Snart blinks at her. “I’m _trying_ to pay attention,” he grouses, his normal tenor rougher than usual, his nasal accent smoothed out. Keystone, not Central. “What do you want, Birdie?”

“Little bit of attention isn’t too much to ask for, is it?” she purrs, trying to hide her deepening panic. “Where’ve you been? What happened?”

He frowns, clearly trying to remember, then the expressions freezes and slips off his face, leaving a vacant stare.

“Rory!” she yelled. “ _Mick!_ ”

He shakes his head. “Why’re you yelling in my ear?” he snaps, _Snart_ snaps, accent back to normal, though still visibly half-asleep. “And what the hell are you doing in my room? Get off of me.”

“Not till you tell me what’s going on with Rory.”

Snart’s eyes narrow a little, though he’s still looking _through_ her. “The Time Masters,” he says bitterly. “They picked him up in the timeline break before we got back to him; they’re trying to engineer a cross of the time streams so it’ll be impossible for us to edit the timeline further to pick him up.”

“How do you know that stuff about time streams, anyway?”

“Mick’s not stupid,” Snart says, all offended like that’s what she was implying. “He’s picking things up just fine.”

“Yes,” she says as patiently as she can. “Then where is _he_ learning it?”

“The end,” Snart says, as if it’s obvious. “The Vanishing Point. Where the Time Masters took him after they picked him up from the forest.”

Sara stares at him. “ _Shit_ ,” she says.

“They’re not happy, though,” Snart says, blinking. “What they’re doing to teach him, it’s not fast enough. There’s work to be done. There’s a chair…”

He starts shaking, full body quakes, muscles jerking involuntarily like he’s been hit by lightning. 

Sara grabs his shoulders. “Snart!” she cries out as he bucks under her, eyes rolling back into his head. “Rory! What’s happening? What are they doing?”

“Induction,” Rory’s voice rasps out, but something’s gone wrong with it. “Pulling out memories one by one. Rebuild the subject from the ground up.”

“You can’t let that happen, Mick,” Sara says firmly, grabbing Snart’s head between her palms. “Mick, listen to me. Snart’s in there with you, every step of the way; you let them pull your memories out of you, they pull it out of him, too.”

Rory scowls at her, that slightly bemused and angry expression he got on his face weirdly at home on Snart’s face. “He’s not with me,” he says grumpily. “He left me behind.”

Fucking boys. They could have just talked this out, but nooooooo…

“Oh yeah?” Sara says. “Then who’s sitting in the chair right now?”

Rory’s eyes in Snart’s face widen and then go vacant. Sara bites her lip, hoping that she’s done the right thing, because right now it looks like _nobody’s_ home in Snart’s body. Knowing those two idiots, they’re probably fighting over the chance to get tortured for the other.

A few minutes later, someone surfaces. They blink but don’t speak; Sara can’t tell which one it is.

“You okay?” Sara asks.

“Fine,” Snart says. “We’re going to kill those bastards.”

“Fine by me,” Sara says. “How’s Rory?”

“I’m fine,” Snart says, puzzled. It sounds like Snart, the accent’s unmistakable, but…oh, crap, they’re both here, that’s what’s going on. 

Play it cool, Sara. 

“You out of the chair?” she says as casually as she can manage.

“We each left half,” he tells her. “They think he’s brand new. They’re calling him Kronos.”

Sara’s hands clench into fists. “Kronos?” she asks. “Are you sure?”

“Pretty damn sure,” he snorts, classic Rory. “My goddamn body.”

“As in, the bounty hunter that’s been tracking us since day one?” Sara clarifies. “I thought you had to avoid crossing your own timeline to avoid paradox.”

“Usually,” the strange composite of a man beneath her replies. “But they wanted to set the timeline to make sure it happened. They’ve been planning this whole time.”

“Exactly how much of this have they been planning?” Sara says, a sinking feeling starting in her gut. 

“I don’t know,” he says grimly. “But I’m going to find out.”

He closes his eyes and goes still.

Sara keeps vigil the whole day, until late in the evening, pacing by his bed and checking the door to make sure no one noticed Snart was missing.

No one does.

Snart opens his eyes. “Sara?” he asks, sounding bemused. “What are you doing in my room?”

She spins to regard him. “What did you find out?” 

“Find out?” he asks. “I was just asleep, you know.”

“With Rory and Kronos!”

He blinks at her like she’s gone crazy.

“Oh, god,” Sara says, suddenly struck with the truth of it. “You don’t have any idea what I’m talking about.”

\----------------------------------

“I’m not doing ‘it’ again,” Snart says irritably, perched on her bed, his arms crossed in front of him. “First, ‘cause it didn’t happen, and secondly, ‘cause your suggestion that it even could happen is _absolutely insane_. I’m out of here.”

“Uh, huh,” Sara says, crossing her own arms. She doesn’t know why he thinks his protests are going to work any better this time than the last fifteen. “You think you can get to the door to leave _through me_ , you’re welcome to try. Maybe if you had your gun you’d have a shot, but as it is, no dice.”

“Well, I wasn’t really expecting to be held prisoner in your bedroom,” he drawls. “Unless, of course, you mean –”

“You’re in a _telepathic bond_ ,” Sara says, rolling her eyes. “That’s as close as you get to soulmates in this life. You can stop hitting on me any time you like.”

Snart looks affronted. “Even if I believed you about this so-called bond,” he says, “doesn’t mean I’m _monogamous_.” He says the word as if it tastes bad.

“Right,” Sara says skeptically. “But sure, if it makes you stop whining. Let’s do it.”

Personally, Sara thought that their bond was incredibly romantic and she wasn’t going to let the two of them screw that up, but if Snart needed to have the truth shoved in his face, so be it. 

Snart hesitates. “Do…what?”

“Sex. You, me, right now.” She grins. “Follow up on all those times you stared at my ass.”

“I’m not really in the mood given that you’re _keeping me prisoner_ ,” he temporizes.

“One time offer,” Sara says, cocking one hip out and leaning forward to make sure he gets the best possible view of her breasts. “C’mon. Now or never, Snart. Sex or we go back to trying to find out what’s happening to Rory. Those are your options.”

Snart scowls at her. He knows exactly what she’s doing, but the beauty of it is, there’s nothing he can do about it.

“I’m not going to fuck you while there’s a chance my partner’s being tortured,” he finally admits, looking exceedingly put out. 

“That’s what I thought,” she says smugly. “Now let’s try this again.”

“I didn’t even know about any telepathic bond before you came up with the idea,” Snart says stubbornly. “Much less how to use it. You sure you’re not just mistaking thirty years’ acquaintance for something you wanna see?”

“Trust me,” Sara says reassuringly. “This isn’t the first time I’ve seen this sort of thing.”

Admittedly, all the others she’d ever met were soul-bonded monks who reached that state of final communion after years of effort and personal sacrifice and had by that point developed perfect control over their bond. But Snart didn’t need to know that.

“Now, from the top. Close your eyes, think of Rory – think of _Mick_ ,” she corrects herself; better to use the terms Snart uses. “Tell me what he’s doing now.”

Snart obediently – if begrudgingly – closes his eyes. “I have no idea,” he says irritably. “I see the back of my eyelids.”

“Relax,” Sara instructed. “Just imagine it. Mick’s a bounty hunter now, right? So he’s travelling in time. Probably got a ship just like this one. An AI like Gideon. Just think about it, travelling through the time stream. He’s probably pissed off at the AI for making too much noise…”

“Nah,” Snart says off-handedly, eyes still closed. “He shut off non-necessary interaction weeks ago.”

“Weeks, huh?” Sara says as casually as she can manage. She’s not sure if Snart’s guessing or if he’s gotten somewhere. “He get his last bounty?”

“Of course he did,” Snart says, sounding offended on Rory’s behalf. “He doesn’t miss. That’s why the Time Masters like him so much; he’s the best example of the post-induction process they’ve got.” 

“Cool,” Sara says. “Did he ever figure out what the Time Masters are planning?”

“They’re always planning something,” Snart says. “But he’s not ready to go after the Waverider yet. They need to make sure he’ll behave appropriately.”

“You mean win.”

“Win or lose, doesn’t matter,” Snart says. “The important thing is to make sure Hunter keeps on track.”

“They want him on track?”

“They’re adjusting his course with the Oculus. With him as the tool, they can maneuver history into the right track to defeat the Thanagarians without getting their hands dirty.”

“They know you know this?”

“Of course not; they’d kill us if they –” Snart opens his eyes. “What the _hell_ was that?”

“Damnit, Snart,” Sara sighs. “We were _finally_ getting somewhere.”

Snart looks freaked out. Sara gets the feeling he didn’t really believe her until now, even when he pretended to give her idea a shot. 

“I still can’t hear him in my head,” Snart says, shaking his head. “I don’t know how I got any of that. It’s like I just opened my mouth and said it without thinking about it.”

“As far as I can tell,” Sara says, plopping down on the bed next to him. “You guys don’t actually _talk_ or any of the usual stuff people with telepathic bonds. You…I don’t know, you share memory space. You’re both computers accessing the same server, if you get my drift.”

“…you know absolutely nothing about computers, do you?”

“Not a thing,” Sara says cheerily, because it’s true. She was a moderately competent user in college, but that was before she got lost on an island and then joined an assassin league that didn’t believe in the twenty-first century, and a lot can happen technologically in five years. “Wanna try again? Try to think of it less as reaching out for him and more as trying to remember what you had for breakfast yesterday. Except instead of your breakfast, think about his.”

Snart closes his eyes again, this time with more enthusiasm. She’s not surprised: Snart’s not the type to be thrown off his game for long, and certainly not when he can get an advantage over other people. 

“Now,” Sara says. “The Time Masters are using Rip. Is he in it with them?”

“No need,” Snart says. “Easy enough to predict what he’d do when that family of his died. There’s a reason they don’t permit familial bonds in the Time Masters.”

“Jesus Christ, they’re the Jedis from the prequels,” Sara muttered.

“Boba Fett,” Snart says abruptly. “I said that. In the 70s. He’s going after us. Got so focused he forgot about the car. Finds it kinda funny that he hit himself.”

“Shit,” Sara says. “Less and less time, then. Try to remember, about the Time Masters – they let Rip’s family die to manipulate him?”

Snart goes quiet.

“Snart?” she says cautiously. She hopes he’s not going in too deep.

He doesn’t answer.

He’s definitely going in too deep. If Sara had a conscience, she’d probably pull him out now to avoid risking brain damage of the sort the monks ominously warned of as a risk of the bond, but the hints he’s given her are too tantalizing to stop now.

“They ordered it,” Snart hisses abruptly, eyes still vacant but face visibly infuriated. “They’re feeding Savage version 2166 future tech. I’ve run across him in the future by accident; I’ve always been ordered to avoid him, but he knows who I am. Who Kronos is. They’ve told him. He finds it funny. I hate him. I hate _them_.”

“Wait, they told who? Told _Savage_?”

“They say that the Oculus predicts that he’s the best hope against the Thanagarians. They don’t know I know. They think the induction’s worked all the way; they think they’ve wiped Mick away. They didn’t wipe me away.”

“Who are you right now?” Sara says gently. The accent is Central, so she would usually guess Snart.

“Mick’s simpler, easier for them to predict, so they don’t suspect him,” Snart says, and his pupils have dilated so much there’s scarcely a ring of color around them. His nose has started bleeding and he’s rocking back and forth in his chair, little subtle unconscious movements. He’s in too deep. She should pull him out.

She doesn’t do anything.

“So he does the talking, when there’s talking to be done,” Snart continues. “But I take a beating better. I sat in that chair. Didn’t want half of those memories anyhow. I left half of myself behind.” 

“You’re spying on them?”

“He walks the day, I walk the night; they don’t bother to look behind the mask and see which one of us it is. The time compression is a problem. Months are passing there for every minute here. No time. Need to get as much info on the Oculus as I can.”

“What’s the Oculus?” Sara demands. She needs this information. She needs it. The whole Waverider needs it, or else things will go _really_ bad.

Snart’s strong, he can hold on just a little bit longer. She’ll pull him out soon, she swears.

“Interactive menu guide to the past, present and future,” Snart laughs, jagged and harsh. “Remote control time travel. They guide history the way they want it to go. They think they’re doing what’s best for the world, but really it’s what’s best for them. They wanted us to attack the nuclear sale so Savage wouldn’t be arrested. Now that he’s seen our faces, he knows about time travel. He’s developing it himself. They’re helping. Everything’s going according to plan. Their plan. _Their plan_ -”

“How do we stop them?”

“Need Snart for that,” he says abruptly, voice shifting tone, dropping an octave. “The piece I got of him isn’t enough. I need the whole thing. I’ve attacked you in the 80s and the 70s. Next is –”

Snart collapses abruptly, limbs going every which way as he tumbles gracelessly to the floor.

“Shit,” Sara says, and goes to him. Just as she kneels beside him, there’s a banging on the door. 

“Sara! Snart!” Jax calls. “Stop…doing whatever it is you’re doing and get out here! Rip’s found the next destination.”

Sara looks down at Snart and looks up at the door, biting her lip. Rip would never believe her about the Time Masters. Snart could try to back her up, assuming he remembers any of it, but she can’t risk him going into the bond like that again, not with Kronos closing in on them; she has no idea what effect it will have.

“Where are we going?” she called back.

“The 1950s!”

 _One more mission_ , she thinks to herself, working on shaking Snart awake. He wakes up bemused and empty, just as she’d expected; the shaky bond was too traumatic for him to retain those memories. He might regain the memories of the conversation they just had in time; he might never remember, she doesn’t know. The monks always said that an untrained bond could eat away a man’s brain faster than a fever.

Luckily, Snart seems to still be able to talk and move and answer basic questions about who the president is (“depends, what time period are we in? Wait, the 50s? Fuck, I don’t know. Ike? JFK?”), so he’s not brain dead the way she’d almost expected him to be after a collapse like that. 

Sara is relieved she hasn’t cooked his brain yet, but when he suggests trying again, she refuses.

_One more mission, then we figure this out._

\---------------------------------

She should have stayed on the ship. She should have warned Rip, whether he believed her or not; she shouldn’t have underestimated the Oculus.

It’s been eight goddamn months since Ray and Kendra and Sara were left behind in the goddamn 1950s and she’s getting sick and tired of being the third wheel in the story of star-crossed lovers that Ray and Kendra are building themselves. Ray seems to be in earnest about it, but Kendra wouldn’t know honest communication if it hit her in the face, hiding her powers and her skills and her anger behind a perfect 1950s mask. They talk about making the best of it. 

Sara pulls Ray aside and tells him that he deserves better than “making the best” until they either get rescued or Carter shows, but it’s no good. He’s in love.

Bitter and out of options, she starts hiking back to Nanda Parbat. At least they’ll take her in there.

She detours to Central City before she does. There’s no reason for it – Snart’s not due to be born for another twenty years and it’s the same for Mick even if she knew where he could be found – but she feels strangely wistful. She just wants to hear that stupid accent again.

Damnit, when did they become friends?

She wanders through the streets of the bad parts of town, listening to gangsters sneer and kids trash talk and she kinda wishes she could bring Stein here, where the white trash put down the black kids and the black kids put down the Natives and no one had any money and everyone hated the commies and the gays without having the slightest idea what they were talking about in either case. 

A heavy hand falls on her shoulder.

Sara sighs. And she’d so been hoping to escape without having to teach yet another guy that the fact that she’s wearing pants doesn’t mean she has loose morals – how does that even work? They’re honestly more covering than most skirts – but she’ll do her ahistorical and violent part for feminism if she has to.

“I want to hurt him,” a mechanical voice says right in her ear. 

Sara tenses, pulling away and yanking out her quarterstaff, turning to face Kronos himself, faceless behind the mask.

“Hurt who?” she asks. “Snart?”

“Not the one you mean,” he says, and gestures at some teenager standing on a street corner, looking cocky. “I want to make him hurt the way he’ll hurt Snart in the future.”

Sara abruptly recalls what she’d heard about Snart’s childhood from Jax. “You can’t kill him; that’d wipe Snart out of existence,” she points out. “And there’s no way he knows what you’ll be hurting him for.”

“I know,” Kronos says. “It’s tempting anyway. I got the nastier half of Snart. The half that survives. There’s no pity there, no mercy.”

“You know about the bond?” she asks, surprised.

“Sure,” Rory says, because it _is_ Rory, mechanized voice or not. “You explained it when you were talking to Snart earlier.”

“Before you attacked our ship and stranded me, you mean?” she asks dryly. “That was eight months ago for me.”

“Hasn’t happened yet for me,” he replies. “Joys of time travel. Tell me, where did I end up hitting you guys? We can go there now; pick up Snart. Once I give him his memory back, we’ll be able to plan out a counterstrike. I needed to borrow the tactical side of him to eavesdrop properly.”

“Why would I help you strand me?” she asks, frowning.

“We need you,” Rory says, “so that we can stop the Time Masters before they know what hit them. They’re focusing the Oculus on Rip. We’ve got a window of opportunity. They won’t be watching Kronos – they know I’ll go after Rip when I finish with Snart. They’ll be making sure Rip is on track as he goes to hunt you down.”

“Where’ll he look for me?” Sara asks. “I was headed to Nanda Parbat. I figured I’d get my name on the records in case anyone from the future wanted to check to see if I had, but if I never make it there, my name won’t appear.”

“Okay,” Rory says agreeably. “So we’ll detour.”

Sara gets a kick out of sneaking into the League of Assassins’ headquarters to put her name down on a list that she won’t actually be part of for another fifty or sixty years. It’s the adrenaline junkie in her. No wonder she’s so fond of Snart. 

It’s a lot easier than it would usually be to sneak in, given that the rest of League is outside trying to stop the random fires that keep appearing as if (coincidentally) a laser gun were being shot out of an invisible ship. Rory’s making loud cawing sounds, too, which has a lot of people yelling “Phoenix!” with extreme consternation and significant confusion. 

Sara snickers, having heard _all_ the legends about a local ‘phoenix’ that have turned into fireside stories told to newbie members of the League by the time she does actually join the league. Good to know they’re as much nonsense as she’d thought at the time. 

After she gets her name down, she hops back into Kronos’ ship and they go to fetch Snart. She lingers behind while he attacks them in the 1950s and feels something snap into place when the Waverider leaves her past self behind. Closed time loop.

Window of opportunity. 

Snart glares at both of them when he wakes up on the jump ship back to Kronos’ ship. “That wasn’t necessary,” he says, pouting. He’d deny it, but it’s totally pouting. 

“You hit me on the head _twice_ ,” Rory points out. He sounds more and more like himself.

“You deserved it,” Snart sniffs. “Now let’s figure out how to destroy these Time Bastards.”

“Let’s start with this Oculus thing,” Sara suggests. “It’s got to have failsafes –”

Snart and Rory both smirk.

“I’ve had literally untold time to case the joint,” Snart says confidently. “They don’t stand a chance.”

It’s amazing how different Snart is from how he was in the 1950s; Sara had known he was acting weird, figured it was the effects of the bond being wonky, but it’s more than that. Snart had said he’d left half of himself to Mick; he really wasn’t kidding.

He’d taken some of Mick in exchange, of course; the temper, the recklessness, the tendency to follow rather than lead. He’d kept the softer parts of himself and they’d shown in his concern and inadvertent kindness, unmasked at last, and in the way he could barely hide his hollowness.

Snart and Rory were standing side by side again, back in their perfect orbit. Better than before, even; it might have only been a week from Snart’s perspective, but from Rory’s it was much longer, and they both had access to that time. Time to learn all about themselves and that bond of theirs. She can see the balance between them, the feeling of _rightness_ , of being in sync; it’s just like those monks back with the League. A perfect fit. 

“Good to see you two back together,” she tells them, and means it whole-heartedly.

Rory leers at her. “That offer you made to Snart still open for me? Or is it only for pretty boys?”

Sara flips him off. “You’re very pretty yourself, my friend,” she says. “But first things first. The Oculus won’t be left undefended. We got a plan?”

“Of course we’ve got a plan,” Snart says. “They don’t tell anybody about the Oculus, so it’s not as well defended as you might think. We’re going to swing by Central 2016 – maybe 2015 when he isn’t as suspicious as he later gets – and you are going to commission Cisco Ramon to help figure out how to turn the Oculus monitoring device into a giant bomb.”

Sara smirks. “I can do that,” she says, remembering what Laurel told her about Cisco. Nice, friendly, as susceptible to a good flirt as the next guy. 

“All I know for sure is that there’s a failsafe,” Snart continues. “Something to make sure that whoever tries to tamper with the device won’t be able to leave it alone until whatever happens, happens.”

Sara’s smirk vanishes. “So it’s a suicide mission?”

“Nah,” Snart says. “A brand new friend of Mick’s, Time Master by the name of Declan, is going to be helping us out with that part.”

Rory smirks and cross his heavily armored arms. It’s a vicious smirk.

“How’re we going to convince him to stay at the Oculus?” Sara asks. “Since I’m guessing from your faces that he’s not going to be throwing his life away for our cause willingly.”

Rory laughs, uncrosses his arms, and reaches down to pop open a console on the main desk.

He pulls something out and shows it to her.

Sara stares.

“You’ve got to be kidding me.” she says flatly.

“You know what they say,” Snart says, smirk having changed into a maniacal grin. “There’s no problem that can’t be fixed with the application of duct tape.”

Sara starts grinning. “Okay,” she says. “Let’s go kick some ass.”

\--------------------------------------------

They meet back up with the rest of the Waverider crew just in time to stop them from breaking into Nanda Parbat in 1960, a full _two years_ after they were originally dropped off. Ugh. She hopes Kendra and Ray have been doing all right. 

Sara takes an extraordinary amount of pleasure in keeping the cloaking shield on Kronos’ ship on while she leans out the window to call down, “Uh, guys? I’m up here!” 

“What in the _world_ –” Rip starts.

“Shh, not so loud!” Sara says. “C’mon, let’s get out of here and chat somewhere more comfortable.”

When she strolls onto the Waverider, Snart at her side and Mick with his Kronos mask on flanking her other side, she’s saddened but not particularly surprised to see how suspicious everyone looks. “What, a girl can’t take a detour?” she asks, crossing her arms. “I’ve just made our job a lot easier, thank you very much.”

“Oh? And how is that, Miss Lance?” Rip says haughtily.

“Christ, you’re right,” Sara says thoughtfully. “He does sound just like his foster mother.”

Mick chuckles, long and deep, and pulls off his mask.

The rest of the crew starts back, looking horrified. “ _Rory?_ ” Jax says, looking nauseated. “But how? I thought Snart…?”

“Snart ditched me, he didn’t ice me,” Mick corrects. “The Time Masters picked me up and took me for a round of induction.” He bares his teeth. “Rip here never mentioned how fond his former bosses were of torture and brainwashing. Didn’t seem to bother you all that much when you were working for them – and don’t say you didn’t know, ‘cause I _met_ you. You from back then, that is. What’s good for the peons you don’t know isn’t good for your family, huh?”

Rip shifts uncomfortably, clearly not having expected this particular revelation to become public. “I didn’t realise the full extent –” he starts.

“Oh, lay off the crap, Rip,” Snart sneers. “We’ve just visited your little Vanishing Point and found out a _lot_ of interesting things – including some things we’re pretty sure you didn’t know about. Like how your former bosses are working with Savage.”

Rip looks offended. “They most certainly are _not_ –”

“Or maybe how they ordered the death of your family,” Sara says, arching an eyebrow. “Since they knew you would react in exactly the way you did. They trained you since you were, what, five? Raised you all up right in the Last Refuge with Miss Mary Xavier?”

Rip goes pale.

Sara turns to look at the rest of the crew and says flatly, “This entire job’s been fixed from the beginning. The Time Masters sent Savage to kill Rip’s family so that he would be encouraged to go adjust time, and they’ve been guiding our every step with something called the Oculus.”

“But don’t worry,” Snart drawls. “We took care of that problem, with a little help from our friends.”

Mick’s vicious little grin widens. “Oh, did we ever,” he says happily. “Now we’ve got two things left to do: go off Savage before the Time Masters manage to collect the pieces –”

“– and take care of a few enemies we might’ve made along the way.” Snart’s own smile is ice cold. “More things Rip never mentioned to us: the Time Masters don’t just have bounty hunters, they have an assassin that specializing in killing people in their own past, when they’re not expecting it. So unless all of you want to be smothered in your cribs, I suggest we get moving.”

“The Omega Protocols have been activated?” Rip says, alarmed. “The Pilgrim – Gideon, we’re going to need to identify the most likely points in time that the Pilgrim will come after –”

“Gideon, belay that order,” Mick snaps. “Protocol 57-DX-13. I’m declaring our _captain_ medically unfit for duty.”

“You can’t do that!” Rip splutters.

“After what you said to Mick on the pirate ship,” Snart says, his smile going even colder. “You don’t really get a say. You couldn’t have done a better job at hitting him right where it hurt most and putting him straight on the path to becoming Kronos if you tried. I can only assume that you are either so blinded by grief that you can no longer function straight, or that you’re actively working with our enemies. But I’m inclined to give you a choice: either you go and lock yourself in the brig all on your lonesome –” He raises the cold gun to point it at Rip’s feet. “– or I freeze your goddamn feet off and carry you there myself.”

“What he said on the pirate ship?” Ray says, pausing from where he was visibly about to leap to Rip’s defense. “What do you mean?”

“Rip said some pretty nasty stuff,” Jax says slowly. “Told Rory he was only brought along ‘cause of Snart, like he was some useless plus one, and told him he had the IQ of – what was it, meat? And that’s after Rory’s saved my life, our lives, at least half a dozen times when he didn’t have to, either.”

“After leaving us locked in space and doing nothing for a week when Mick consistently asked to be let out,” Snart drawls. “A perfect storm to encourage a rebellion that’d have to be put down.”

“You cannot seriously believe that I’m conspiring against you with the people who, according to you, _murdered my family_!”

“Nah,” Sara says. “But you’re the one that got us into this without full information, and you’re the reason all the plans up till now have been going sideways at every possible moment. The Time Masters were tracking _you_ , not us.” She looks at the remaining crew. “If we want to get out of this alive, we have no choice but to do it without Rip. He took us out into the field knowing exactly what type of damage we might do, and he never tells us _shit_ about time travel except when it directly affects us.”

“If the Time Masters were manipulating us,” Kendra says. “Then Carter might not’ve died without us coming on this trip. _Aldus_ might’ve died in his bed, peacefully.”

“Miss Saunders –”

“You ordered me to assassinate Stein, Rip, you remember that?” Sara says sweetly, seeing the older man start at the information and turn to study Rip’s face, which reveals the truth of her claim all too well. “Because the risk of him revealing the secrets of Firestorm was too great to count? I was too caught up in my blood-hunger then to notice, but it says a lot about how much you value our contributions that the _risk_ is more important to you than the _rescue_.” Stein glances at Jax, who nods confirmation; they both take a step away from Rip.

“Like I said at the time,” Snart drawls. “Leaving one of your own behind, that’s just cold. And how many times have you done that so far on this trip alone?”

“I haven’t _intentionally_ –”

“Like I said,” Snart cuts him off. “Either incompetence or actual malevolence, it doesn’t matter to me. You’re out. We’ll rescue your family and kill Savage, which is what we agreed to in the first place, and then we’re going to drop you off at home with your wife and son, just like you said you wanted.” His eyes glitter. “You know what’s _real_ interesting, Rip? We saw a time fragment when we were in the Vanishing Point. Us, if we’d carried through with your plan.”

“Snart was dead,” Sara ticks off with her fingers. “Ray was broken-hearted.” Ray starts in surprise. “Future Carter had been brainwashed into being Savage’s slave for years.” Kendra’s head snaps up as well. “ _My sister_ had been murdered and you wouldn’t let me save her to protect your precious timeline. Your family, Rip, was still dead, ‘cause you got there too late _anyway_. But you’d decided to carry on – and declare yourself the new master of the timeline.”

“‘Someone needs to be responsible for protecting the timeline’,” Mick mimics savagely. “‘Who better than a former Time Master?’ Something you’ve thought about, Rip, in the dark hours?”

Rip’s pale cheeks flush.

The entire crew has now moved away from him.

“So I repeat,” Snart drawls, gun pointed and held steady. “You either lock yourself in the brig and let us save your family for you – unless being a hero matters more to you than the end result of saving them, that is, in which case we’ll do it for you. Your pick.”

Rip stares at all of them, now gathered by Sara. “You realize this is mutiny,” he says quietly.

“You realize that we’re going to save your family anyway, Rip,” Sara says gently. “It’s up to you if you feel the need to control how we do that, in which case, we’ll leave you to your ‘mission’ in peace. But if you want them saved – if you _really_ want to save Miranda and Jonas – then you’ll turn over control of the mission to us. We’re your only hope, Rip.”

“None of us want that future to come to pass,” Mick rumbles. “And all that’s standing between us and that is you.”

Rip is silent for a long moment.

They wait, tense, for his decision; even Firestorm draws closer together, Kendra’s shoulders tense in preparation to draw her wings, Ray’s fingers flicker down to his pocket where his Atom suit is hiding. 

“Very well,” he finally says, voice bitter and angry. “I will go to my room – my room, not the brig, if that’s _acceptable_ to you – and remain there until my family has been saved or you require my assistance. Satisfactory?”

“That’ll do us just fine, Rip,” Sara says, smiling. Mick steps forward and escorts him out of the room and Sara turns to look at the rest of the crew: _her_ crew, now. Snart’s at her back, strong and reassuring and tapped in so his partner doesn’t miss a moment, his fingers flying over the keyboard as he programs in some safeguards to keep Rip from calling in Gideon to help him.

“My fellow crewmates – let’s go kick some ass.”


End file.
